A decade ago, research by Pinar Enneli, Tariq Modood and Harriet Bradley identified Turkish-speaking people in Britain (Turkish Cypriots, and Turks and Kurds from mainland Turkey) as ‘invisible minority groups.’ ‘Such groups’, it was noted, ‘make little appearance in public debates about race relations and have been little studied within academic social science.’

Hopefully, this is about to change because of the latest, and indeed scandalous, argument of the British Vote Leave campaign, that (i) Turks engender a threat to national security, and (ii) 12 million Turks will flood into Britain if Britain remains in the EU and Turkey successfully joins the EU.

As Turks have made the front pages of newspapers and become central to the public debates regarding Brexit/Bremain, there seems to be an opportunity for Turks to come to the fore, to become more “visible” within the fabric of multi-ethnic Britain. Thus, rather than focusing on Turkey’s EU accession journey or what would be the consequences of an alleged/imagined massive influx of Turks in the UK, I believe that it is more important to take the recent media coverage of Turks as an opportunity to make a case for Turks already residing in the UK.

Drawing on their recent research Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood consider whether the British or American social compact is conducive to the incorporation of Muslims, and find that while the US may be more of a secular state, the UK is a more secular society and with a more secularist political culture. They argue that both can offer meaningful routes to not only political participation, but also meaningful incorporation of Muslim minorities.

Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination, his rhetoric on Muslims has enthralled American political discourse. Meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic, Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US triggered a petition, signed by over 570,000 people, seeking in turn to ban Trump from Britain. While Islamophobia is certainly not absent from British political discourse, the Trump phenomena and reactions to it across both sides of the Atlantic raises an interesting question as to the comparative status of Muslims and Islam in the public square in the US and Britain.

British society is in serious need of higher levels of religious literacy. The potential for misunderstanding, stereotyping and oversimplification based on ignorance is huge – and schools have a big part to play in putting this right.

Religion has dramatically changed in Britain. Fewer people profess Christianity, more profess a post-Christian spirituality, humanism or atheism, while Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and Jewish communities assert themselves in public and seek to play a role in shaping policies.

Yet the degree of understanding of these faith actors and of religion in general is low. The need for investment in religious literacy is one of the main themes of the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life (CORAB), which has just published a report called Living With Difference – in which I was involved as a member of the steering group. As religious literacy and experience of diversity begins at school, we have recommended some changes to the place of religion in state education.

In 2020, Western multiculturalism will be an even more significant feature of political debate and controversy than it is today. Gender and sexual orientation will have become relatively uncontroversial aspects of group identity and campaigns against disadvantage and misrecognition. Cultural difference, especially ethnoreligious difference, will, however, continue to be political battlegrounds. This will be the case particularly in Western Europe, with the non-white population having reached 15%, and the Muslim population about 10%, and concentrated in the towns and cities, in some of which – following the trend started some years ago in California – white native-born people will cease to be a majority. This will be true of London – Europe’s most populous city – but the same trend will be evident in Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, greater Paris and Marseille amongst others.